The use of pesticides in crop farming is a very common ‘gotcha’ that meat-eaters use against vegans when comparing the animal death toll and environmental impact of our food systems. But a new report has found that huge quantities of these harmful chemicals are being used to grow crops for animal feed. Claire Hamlett reports.

Industrial animal agriculture is a major driver of the use of dangerous pesticides, a new report from World Animal Protection (WAP) and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) shows. Toxic chemicals are being used in huge quantities in the US to grow crops used to feed intensively farmed animals, with the most recent data from 2018 revealing that nearly a quarter of a billion pounds of herbicides and insecticides were used in the US just to grow soybeans and corn for animal feed. 

“The growth and expansion of factory farming is not only perpetuating enormous cruelty and suffering for the billions of animals farmed annually,” the report states, “but also pushing wild animals and plants to the brink by destroying their native habitat and then drenching what is left in massive quantities of toxic pesticides.”

The pesticides used are harmful and even deadly to humans as well as to many wild plant and animal species, including several that are protected under America’s Endangered Species Act. Glyphosate, Atrazine, and Dicamba were among the most heavily used pesticides. Atrazine has been banned in 35 countries and in the EU due to its contamination of groundwater. Glyphosate is the subject of 13,000 lawsuits in the US for causing non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Dicamba has also been linked to several types of cancer in workers who apply it. Its use has increased a whopping 1,200 per cent since 2012.

Among the wildlife most impacted by the various pesticides being used are the highly endangered whooping crane, monarch butterflies, black-footed ferrets, and keystone species like prairie dogs. Many of these animals are also suffering from their habitat being converted into monoculture maize and soy fields. From 2018 to 2019 alone around 2.6 million acres of ecologically important grasslands in the US were turned into fields mostly to grow feed crops.

Only a handful of companies manufacture and sell the majority of these toxic agrochemicals, including Bayer AG/Monsanto, Syngenta AG, and BASF. with their headquarters in countries like Germany where some of the chemicals are banned for agricultural use. According to the report, the political influence of the pesticide industry in the US means that the Environmental Protection Agency allows the use of 85 pesticides that have been banned or are being phased out in the EU, China or Brazil.

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There is indeed a lot of money being made by companies like Bayer AG in producing pesticides used for growing animal feed. In 2020, Greenpeace Unearthed published an investigation revealing how the world’s biggest pesticide companies made billions of dollars from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people and nature, with the most valuable markets “by far” for these products being soy and maize farming.

The report by WAP and CBD recommends that governments support shifts to plant agriculture and plant-based diets using financial and policy levers. But clearly moving to a plant-based food system needs to be coupled with farming in the most sustainable, ecologically-friendly way. The report recommends a long-term goal of redirecting “subsidies and financial incentives towards diversified cropping systems that reduce or eliminate chemical pest management practices” and an increase in “funding and technical support for farmers’ markets, community gardens, urban agriculture, and chemical-free and less intensive production and market opportunities to increase access to fresh produce.” Growing crops organically, i.e. without synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, requires more land than growing crops intensively. But growing crops organically or non-intensively for direct human consumption will still use far less land than if we continue to grow crops to feed farmed animals or if we graze animals extensively. The impacts on wildlife will also be greatly reduced by freeing more land from agricultural production.

The report helps to highlight the links between farmed animal suffering and harm to wildlife, something which is often overlooked in debates about animal agriculture. Moreover, as pesticides are derived from fossil fuels, their excessive use to enable intensive animal agriculture further reveals how no amount of dystopian technological ‘solutions’ to the greenhouse gas emissions from animal farms will help us move to an ecologically healthy and low-carbon future.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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